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A musician by the name of Martin Molin, from the Swedish band Wintergatan, has created and built an amazing musical instrument he calls the Marble Machine — and you won’t believe how good it sounds.

The finished product contains 2,000 marbles and 3,000 parts, and Molin says it took 14 months to build. He designed the machine around several musical instruments, most prominently a vibraphone that’s activated when the marbles hit the bars. There’s also an integrated electric bass guitar where the machine plucks the strings, and then the human operator plays the frets. As the machine plays music, it recycles the marbles so that they are used again and again throughout. The machine also contains a built-in Turkish crash cymbal and some other percussion, along with a giant “breakdown” arm that grinds the machine to a quick halt whenever desired.

To create the Marble Machine, Molin handcrafted all of the wooden parts, routing mechanisms, funnels to catch the marbles, and countless other pieces. As Molin worked on the project, he posted YouTube videos along the way showing his progress, and how certain parts of the machine were conceived, made, and refined. I’ve integrated some of the videos in this post, but they’re all worth watching. If you’re only going to watch one, though, watch the final music video below: Even the song is excellent.

My biggest question when watching the music video, aside from the astonishment at how beautifully the machine was engineered and how good it “sounded,” was exactly that latter point: How is Molin getting such produced, mixed, and mastered audio out of what must be the world’s largest wood-and-metal rattletrap of components? If you’ve ever recorded a band or your own instrument playing, you know how tricky it is to get a decent live sound in a room. It almost seems fake, like the music was produced somewhere else and the video was made to look like the machine was playing the various parts of the song when it wasn’t.

It turns out it’s absolutely real. What’s happening here is that Molin set up a series of microphones around the instrument to record the kick drum, the vibraphone, the room ambience, and so on as he played. Each microphone is recording onto a separate track on a computer running Apple Logic Pro. The reason the audio is coming out pristine is that he’s processing the recorded sound of each instrument in real time, so what you’re hearing is the final “mixed” result, again in real time.

For example, as he shows in the above video, the kick drum is processed in Apple Logic Pro with a series of plug-ins that ‘gate’ (or mute) the background clanging and clicking from the machine whenever the kick drum isn’t sounding. Molin also added EQ, compression, some overdrive, and other tweaks to make it sound like a real, and highly processed, kick drum. In the video, you can see about a minute in where he fades out the camera sound (which has all the marble rolling and metal racket you’d expect) and fades in the recorded sound. Then he shows specifically how he takes out the background noise of the machine using a noise gate plug-in. The next part of the same video shows one example of how he programs the parts; it’s basically like a giant music box, with the plastic pegs hitting hammers that then play notes as Molin hand-cranks the giant wheel.

This goes on throughout; you can see that the machine is plucking the bass guitar strings, but that Molin is playing the fretboard with one hand while he turns the main crank with his other hand.

The finished music video is clearly polished in the visual department as well, and for that he brought in Swedish filmmaker Hannes Knutsson. “When we started filming, we knew we wanted to film the machine against as clean a background as possible to give the viewer a chance of seeing how the machine works,” Molin said. They ended up using floor paint protection paper, like you’d use to protect the floor of a room while painting, to make the white background. Really, there’s too much to go into in one article, so be sure to check out the finished music video above and the making-of summary video below.

This guy is a musical madman! Awesome stuff. Thanks for the article. :)

Rawr

Those look more like metal ball bearings than actual glass marbles.

kc

needs a monkey

Vaidas Sukauskas

Yeah, it’s nice and all. But I just don’t get the point of these one-trick contractions. Sure, ENIAC was a superb computer for it’s time, but it’s still a one purpose built machine. Same goes for this. Except we do have many musical applications worthy of adoration. If you are wowed by this, but not by ableton live….

eonvee375

how every instrument should look like! ^^

ricky

It is a Steele, not a marble machine.

clayusmcret

Sweet! Thanks for sharing this with us.

webweave

I don’t think the machine is fake but I find it hard to believe that the tempo is as solid as the video tries to make us believe.

I really like what he made and I don’t want to detract from that but the tempo is too perfect for a hand crank machine with no regulator. Looking at the sound track on Logic it only took 3 beats for Logic BPM counter to detect 73.5 bpm and it never varies more than 0.10+/- for the entire track. If you then set your tempo to 73.5 every beat lines up perfectly. I have experience with hand crank and clockwork musical instruments and the variation is usually much greater than that on devices with metal gears and precise mechanical regulators.

The machine may be real but I don’t believe the soundtrack matches what the machine would produce. In the making of videos there’s one clip where you can see him using Logic to shape the mic hits to sound like drums (why does he not just use a drum?) if you look at the timeline on his screen it shows a lot more tempo variation. This says to me that he at least quantized the material.

Again really nice work and I hope this encourages people to go out and make things but overall I’m kind of sad if the creator felt that he needed to force a high precision tempo to cover up what might have been a pleasing and unique to this machine character of a tempo that slightly rises and falls.

Could someone else reproduce my test?

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